The year the government broke

One sign of just how bad things have gotten is that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), for so many years a hot-headed maverick who annoyed colleagues of both parties, has emerged as a measured, statesmanlike voice of conciliation in the current crisis. “We started out with a false premise here, on this side of the aisle,” McCain said this week. “And that was that somehow we were going to repeal Obamacare.” Noting his own opposition to the president’s plan throughout the legislative debate over it, and into the 2012 election, McCain added, “The American people spoke. So somehow to think that we were going to repeal” the law, “of course was a false premise, and I think did the American people a grave disservice by convincing them that somehow we could.”

Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), one of a handful of House GOP moderates who has drawn widespread media attention for working with Democrats to try to find a way to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling without political preconditions, said the problem is that there are “two to three dozen” House Republicans who “don’t share that same sense of governance,” and “who somehow pretend that Mitch McConnell is the majority leader of the Senate and Mitt Romney is president.”

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Asked if he felt his name was apt for someone who has lately taken incoming fire from colleagues angered by his accommodation, Dent just chuckled and said, “It’s a great name, an English name — the Latin root is ‘tooth.’” He added, “Only in this town can a person become momentarily famous for stating the obvious.”

In fact, Dent stands out because congressmen these days are much more apt to deny the obvious. Dick Cheney’s defiant contention as vice president that “deficits don’t matter” seems quaint in comparison with the prevailing brand of conservative populism, which is willing to swat away inconvenient facts as if they were so many pesky flies.

“I’m of the philosophy that we don’t need to raise the debt ceiling,” Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) said this week. “We have enough money, enough revenues coming in on a daily basis that we can pay our bills.”

Indeed, the essence of conservatism has changed in the past 60 years, as it has incorporated elements of nihilism and anti-intellectualism that past Republican elites would have scorned. Sarah Palin has nothing in common with the reigning right-wing Republican of the post-World War II era, Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio), who was known as “Mr. Conservative.” In “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party,” published last year, author Geoffrey Kabaservice recounted what happened when a voter at a campaign rally once asked Taft’s wife if he was a “common man.”

“Oh, no,” Martha Taft replied. “He is not at all. He was first in his class at Yale and first in his class at Harvard Law School. I think it would be wrong to present a common man as a representative of the people of Ohio.”

Former Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), who first went to work as a congressional staffer in 1977 and later served seven terms himself before becoming Obama’s transportation secretary in 2009, said, “I would rank this Congress as the worst in the sense of their inability to do anything, to pass any major legislation. Nobody can ever remember when Congress couldn’t pass a farm bill — always bipartisan, always with a good, comprehensive approach. Nobody can remember when a Congress has ever passed a two-year transportation bill, not a five-year one. People can’t remember a time when the Senate was able to do a bipartisan immigration bill and it’s not even considered by the House.”

“I think at some point Boehner has to say that ‘I care more about moving these issues forward than I do about my leadership,’’’ LaHood added. “If he doesn’t lose his speakership over the fact that he’s willing to use Democratic votes to pass things, he’s going to lose it over the fact that Republicans will get voted out of office and lose the majority in the next election. People around the country are scratching their heads. America is the greatest country in the world, but it can’t get its act together.”